Not that the talking point ever made logical sense, but we now know that the left was practicing anti-science with those oft-repeated claims that insuring the uninsured will cut down on expensive emergency room visits. A Harvard study discovered that when the once-uninsured were given Medicaid, emergency room visits increased by a whopping 40%. And once again, we not only have another instance of Democrats lying to pass ObamaCare, but of the media letting them get away with it as well.
The reason the talking point never made sense in the first place is that the political left was trying to sell the American people on the idea that insuring the uninsured would somehow be cheaper for the American taxpayer than paying for the indigent to visit the emergency room. Not only is the accounting ridiculous, but we are supposed to somehow believe that a Medicaid card includes the fairy dust necessary to change human behavior.
And how exactly is footing the bill to fully insure someone cheaper than a hospital building the cost of unpaid emergency room bills into everyone’s medical bill? And if you think unpaid emergency room visits are expensive, just wait until you see what we the taxpayers end up paying for them. Insurance boosts the price of everything.
So now that millions have been added to the Medicaid rolls through ObamaCare, we the taxpayers can expect to pay for millions more emergency room visits. This, when we were assured by our media and government that the exact opposite would happen.
For how many years has our media allowed the left to get away with this glib talking point without ever once — as far as I have seen — questioning the logic or demanding the data to back it up? Good grief, how many times have we heard members of the objective, unbiased, not-at-all-liberal media repeat this illogical and factually incorrect talking point as objective fact.
Over the years we have seen the media go to extraordinary lengths to “debunk” every imaginable criticism of Barack Obama, including the simple dissemination of information found in the president’s own auto-biographies. But this very same media’s contribution to the “emergency room” myth has been indispensible in spreading an outright falsehood to sell ObamaCare.
Why would we expect anything less from a media that let Obama repeatedly lie about people being able to keep the insurance they like under ObamaCare. The media knew he was lying, but also knew that if they exposed the lie, ObamaCare would have never passed and Obama never would have won re-election.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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